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Tag: Management

I decided to write this blog, in order to share my experiences as an HR professional. After 10 years of working in many different companies, I have faced some situations where HR seems to get trapped, and that I believe are not son infrequent in daily practice.

I don’t want to state that in HR there are only these kind of situations. I can recall a lot of successful stories. But I really think is important for HR professionals to be aware and to avoid these “puzzling” situations.

Please feel free to comment and share your opinion:

Situation 1 HR Trends

I think is very tempting for HR teams, to get trapped in the initiative “of the moment”. This happens for example with talent management. Many companies are changing names of their systems, for example, instead of recruitment is “talent acquisition”. Nevertheless, is these trends really adequate for the culture, strategy and stage of maturity of the company. In many cases, Talent management is implemented without having any other system before, and in my opinion, to identify and measure talent require a company that at least is used to have performance metrics in the past. The tip is to ask, is this initiative strategically relevant to my company? Is it prepared to implement it successfully?

Situation 2 HR Kafkian Trap

Franz Kafka in his book “The Process” describes a public organization with countless procedures and controls. I think in HR there is a tendency that could lead us to this Kafkian world. For example, I remember to invest hundreds of hours in building a very comprehensive competencies manual that finally becomes unpractical and confusing for managers. It was just too much. This could happen with recruitment, training, or any HR initiative. I think the secret to avoid this is always ask: How in the world this will be applied? and is the application user-friendly?

Situation 3. The User Problem

This is when some HR initiatives are very innovative and cool, but nobody are really using them in the appropriate way. For example a company could have an incredible performance management system, but if the managers don’t know how to give effective feedback and set goals, the system will lost all its power of change. I think is very important to avoid this, to train the users and to reinforce the appropriate use always

I hope you find interesting this examples, and feel free to give me suggestions.